May 23rd report

Hello. We drove from Enid to Pampa, and had lunch there. Storms were already ongoing further to the north-west, behind the cold front. A storm then formed to our west, moving NNE. We headed north, and intercepted it over halfway up the road to Perryton. We couldn't see much as there was a lot of haze as the humidity was high, and there was a lot of low cloud too.

The storm was then tornado warned, and we headed west on a Farm to Market road, eventually seeing the low-level rotation - for a while it looked interesting but the cooler outflow undercut the wall cloud and it became outflow dominant.

Further cells were forming back to the S and so we headed east and then a little SE, towards Canadian. We paused just south of where we expected these storms to cross - however, we then took our eyes off the ball for a short while - but long enough to not notice one of the cells suddenly wrap-up and produce a large tornado. We saw the report (our internet was not working for a while) and headed north - we caught the tail-end of it, seeing a white rope-like tornado, but we'd missed the main show - which was quite gutting!

Anyway, we sucked it up (pun intended) and headed back south a little to observe the next cells coming in. These looked fairly pretty but were rather outflow dominant - after a while we called it a day and drove the 125 miles to Amarillo for the night.

We passed through some intense dust, blown by high winds caused by a few thunderstorms to our south - the temperature also went up to around 26C, but less than 10 mins and 10 miles further SW, the temperature was 13C! Winds had been gusting to around 60mph, and it was pretty hairy for a while!

All in all, it was frustrating missing the tornado when we were so close, and had targeted the area - but that's just life when it comes to storm chasing! You can't win them all!

A couple of pics below from the later storm as well as a capture from the video camera (with some tweaking to bring out the contrast) to show the tornado.